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19.12.08

There are lots of notes in Carter’s music. Lots of them. But for my development as a composer and listener, the passages (or entire movements) where Carter allows one note to carry the entire musical argument or at least the expressive content have been most telling.

The seventh Etude of Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (woodwind quartet, 1950) is a study on one note. The expressive arc of the piece is described through dynamics, accents, and changing instrumental colors. After composing his Brass Quintet for the American Brass Quintet in 1974, Carter gave them a Christmas gift called A Fantasy about Purcell’s “Fantasia upon One Note”. Carter’s arrangement of Purcell’s viol piece emphasizes the drone that sounds throughout the piece with changing colors and dynamics.

Carter’s Piano Concerto (1964) is a dramatic work exploring the relationship between an expressive individual (the soloist) and an oppressive group (the orchestra). Late in the Concerto’s second, and final, movement, the orchestra gradually builds a chord that leaves only one note in the middle silent, and the piano is “forced” onto that note at the climax of the work. In the Oboe Concerto (1988) the orchestra keeps coming back to the somber, sustained music that it plays at the beginning. Eventually the soloist repeatedly honks her lowest Bb (the lowest note on the instrument) repeatedly, in an attempt to get the orchestra on to another expressive mode.

Carter’s use of one-note passages in widely divergent expressive contexts has been a valuable lesson to me, not only in technical terms, but as a direct lesson in how important context is in determining the meaning of musical events. Additionally, I’ve thought of it as something of a bridge to my equal love of music that is more thoroughly built on limited means, like that of Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams. The commonalities between seemingly incompatible styles is often much more important than the differences.

17.12.08

By the last part of the 19th century, the make-up of the symphony orchestra was largely standardized. The core of the orchestra was a large body of strings. The woodwinds and brass were in pairs, sometimes three, and the percussion consisted of a timpanist and maybe one or two additional percussionists, depending on the piece being played.

The music composed for the orchestra naturally reflected its make-up (and vice-versa), with the chief melodic burden carried by the strings. More specifically, the violins carry the melody most of the time because tonal harmony was built from the bass up. The orchestral music of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss shook this model up some, as they frequently put the winds in the role of melody-carrier for the bulk of a piece, with the strings more in the background. Much of the orchestral music of the first half or so of the 20th century was cast in the strings- or winds-centric tradition or treated the orchestra as a collection of chamber groups, rarely using the whole orchestra.

Claude Debussy went further than many composers in imagining an orchestral sound not based on strings, or on the opposition of strings and winds. He proposed seating orchestras so that winds sat near the strings that were in their same register—for example, flutes would sit near the violins. When Carter was asked to write a piece for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, it seems appropriate that he took that particular occasion to rethink the orchestra along those Debussian lines.

Carter wanted to celebrate the ability of the modern orchestra with this commission. (One of the salient facts of the history of the orchestra in the 20th century is its explosive virtuosity. There are some effects in Strauss’ music that were written to be blurs; he knew the orchestras of his day could not play them precisely, whereas today’s student orchestras can and do.) Accordingly, Carter wrote a concerto for orchestra, rather than symphony. He wanted to portray the orchestra as a group of individuals—highly skilled, expressive members of a functioning society—so almost every member of the orchestra gets a solo or at least a prominent moment.

Given that Carter’s music was no longer thematic in nature nor was it composed along tonal lines, he took Debussy’s notion and used instrumental register as the organizing basis of the form of the Concerto for Orchestra. The Concerto is in four sections (the music is continuous), each one featuring instruments in a given range. The first section is scored for tenor-register instruments (cellos, trombones, bassoons, etc). It is written in decelerating phrases that start faster and get slower at each appearance. The second is written for soprano-register instruments like flutes and violins. It is fast music in even note values that slows down over the course of the piece. And so on.

Not surprisingly, the sections don’t appear one after the other in order, though it is true that the first one dominates the first quarter of the piece, the second the second-quarter, etc. Rather each movement is briefly interrupted by the other three according to a structural polyrhythm of 10:9:8:7. There is something cinematic about how Carter cross-cuts between different kinds of music, music that develops over the course of the entire piece.

The Concerto came near the end of Carter’s exploratory period. Writing an orchestral work with fairly thick textures presented a problem for the composer—how do you write chords for substantial groups of orchestral instruments without resorting to octaves? (Octaves tend to emphasize a pitch and make it sound like a tonal center.) In the Second Quartet Carter assigned intervals to each instrument. In this Concerto he assigned intervals to each group, and piled up these intervals into chords of as many as seven notes. In this way each group has a large repertoire of chords that are used to give each section its own distinctive sound.

Each orchestral group has a particular three-note chord fixed in its characteristic register—the four trichords add up to a twelve-note chord that represents a kind of home base for all of the harmonic materials of the Concerto. This chord appears at important structural points like the cross-cutting of the sections.

Midway through composing the Concerto Carter read Vents (“Winds”) by the French poet St. John Perse. Vents is an epic poem about America being swept by great winds of change. The colorful, ebullient music Carter was writing seemed to him to fit the broad ideas of the poem as well as the tenor of the times. The Concerto fairly sings of the turmoil and passions of the 1960s and places them and American concert music, in an artistic and cultural context.

The first several measures of the Concerto for Orchestra are concerned with setting the stage for the work. The percussion plays long rolls on drums and cymbals while the notes of the “home base” chord are introduced. Once all of the chord’s notes have appeared, a harp glissando triggers the whirling activity that leads up to the beginning of the first section. After the winds sweep through the orchestra during the main body of the piece trombone glissandos (only the second glissandos of the piece) signal the beginning of the raucous Coda. The Coda is marked by ringing bells, as if heralding the new world the winds have brought to life. The bells die away, the piece ends quietly. We have our new world, what are we going to do with it?

15.12.08

2. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Between his 80th and 100th birthdays, Carter completed some 40 compositions, from occasional pieces for solo instruments to two of the biggest pieces of his career, the Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (47 minutes) and the composer’s only opera to date, What Next? (1997, ca. 40 minutes). Between his 40th birthday in 1948 (the date of the Cello Sonata) and his 60th in 1968, he completed nine works.

Those 20 years found Carter exploring the nature and potential of musical materials—especially those relating to pitch and rhythm. In the Cello Sonata, the First String Quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, the first six of the Eight Pieces for Four Timpani, the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, and the Variations for Orchestra (all of which were composed between 1948 and 1955), Carter conducted these explorations in a mostly tonal environment, and where the rhythmic innovations could still be readily heard within the context of a beat or of multiple underlying beats.

Carter’s explorations bore decisive fruit in the two works he composed at the same time in the second half of the 1950s: the Second String Quartet (1959) and the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). In the Second Quartet, as we have seen, Carter applies his researches to the idea of establishing a distinct musical character for each instrument.

The request for a piece for harpsichord and piano immediately presented Carter with problems of a distinctly sonic nature. The piano is much louder than the harpsichord and has a much wider dynamic range; the harpsichord, through the use of stops, has a wider range of colors available; the piano sound can resonate for quite sometime, while that of the harpsichord cannot. The solution that Carter chose was to give each instrument a small orchestra that would soften the differences between the soloists—for example, three of the four brass instruments are assigned to the harpsichord’s orchestra, to make up for the difference in volume.

Each orchestra includes two percussionists playing a large battery of unpitched instruments. Both solo instruments have an element of percussion in how they produce sound, so the narrative of the Double Concerto comes, in part, from the soloists bridging the gap in their own ensembles between pitched and unpitched instruments. The music moves between extremes of percussive noise and pristine chords in the winds and strings.

The Double Concerto begins in noise. Carter’s research into pitch and rhythm led him to link them in ways very different from those adopted by the serialist composers working at about the same time. The cymbal and drums rolls of the beginning move in waves whose durations are related to specific intervals—in this way pitch and rhythm are tied together but not in a mechanical way. As the intervals are gradually introduced the waves of percussion meet in works first climax, which dies away and joins to a movement featuring the harpsichord, with piano commentary.

At the center of the work is a chorale for the winds and strings. At the same time the soloists and percussion whirl around the chorale in phrases that accelerate and decelerate against the steady music of the winds and strings. The climax comes at the end of the chorale with single high notes on antique cymbals (the only pitched percussion in the entire piece).

Carter has described the Double Concerto as being analogous to a world coming into being from chaos (the noise at the beginning) and functioning as a working living organism. After final spectacular solos from both the harpsichord and the piano, the music pauses. Then a great percussive crash signals the beginning of the Coda, which is really an extension and composing-out of that crash. The music moves back towards noise while quietly dying away. Carter has said that he took inspiration from poems by Pope and Lucretius about the beginnings and endings of worlds, but the music is really much more direct: From noise you came and to noise you will return.

13.12.08

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is art about art. There has always been meta-art, though more often than not the references to art-about-art were localized within a given work, but recent decades have seen the idea raised to a controlling principle in a great number of works in all artistic media.

The string quartet, as both medium (the combination of two violins, viola, and cello) and as genre (pieces for string quartet that make full musical statements, as opposed to occasional pieces), has been an important part of Carter’s development for most of his career. In the Second (completed in 1959) and Third (1971), Carter pushes the genre in new (for him) poetic directions.

The four players in the Second Quartet are given distinct musical characters and expressive styles, which are derived from individual interval content and rhythmic characteristics. The drama inheres in how these four individuals communicate—and how they don’t. In the Third Carter reconfigures the ensemble into two duos and asks that they be seated as far apart on the stage as possible. He then gives them a different number of movements to play (one of the duos has six movements, the other has four) and arranges them so that each movement of one duo is played simultaneously (at some point in the piece) with every movement of the other duo.

In the Fifth Quartet Carter takes this idea of anthropomorphizing the instruments into characters acting out what Carter has called “auditory scenarios” to the meta-art level. Here the instruments/characters are members of a string quartet in rehearsal. The Quartet is structured along lines that are a familiar part of Carter’s late late style—a kind of returning music alternates with contrasting movements, which are more or less fully developed. In this piece, as opposed to the returning “rain music” of Boston Concerto, the links between movements consists of fragments. The fragments consist of snippets of previous movements, hints of what is to come, and brief improvisatory phrases based on each instrument’s interval repertoire.

The links convey the feeling of being in a rehearsal. As the ideas are tried out and lines “practiced”, agreement is eventually reached on what kind of music to rehearse. The Quartet’s six movements are examples of most of Carter’s characteristic textures and modes, especially from his quartets. These include “scorrevole” (“scurrying”, one of Carter’s favorite, regardless of medium), energetic, slashing chords, and serene chorale phrases.

A favorite narrative strategy of Carter’s is overlapping forms. This is a natural outgrowth of his interest in structural heterophony. I mentioned that the duos in the Third Quartet have different numbers of movements and that all possible combinations of movements between the duos occur over the course of the piece. The most telling moments of the piece happen when a new movement starts in one duo while the other duo continues playing its own movement.

This strategy is pervasive in the Fifth Quartet. The fifth, and final, Interlude is dominated, for the most part, by the fantastic, aggressive phrases of the first violin, while the rest of the group attempts to “rehearse” other parts of the piece. Finally, the rest of the ensemble begins the last movement (“Caprriccioso”) several measures before the first violin finishes her own capricious playing.

This final movement is a dance played entirely pizzicato (plucking the strings instead of bowing them)—the pizzicato playing in the other instruments is one reason the overlap is so apparent here. The strumming and plucking continues to an exuberant climax and a brief relaxation, only to suddenly build to another climax. This is followed by a very brief (less than three measures) bowed section—it moves to a kind of resolution. The rehearsal ends.

10.12.08

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen (he died in 1992). What stays with me about his music is its brilliant color and the sheer exuberance of it, bordering on ecstasy, and often crossing that border.

One of the great privileges of my life as a musician was to lead a performance of the composer's Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds) with the extraordinary John Salmon as pianist. The short concert (the rest of the program was given over to chamber music of Morton Feldman, who produces his own kind of ecstasy) was held in the sanctuary of the Episcopal Student Center in Tallahassee--the design of which is kind of a Scandanavian Modern, with lots of stone and curved walls. The reverb was intense and Messiaen's birds had plenty of room to take flight.

An article I wrote on Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time"), can be found here.

9.12.08

Carter has always been a literary composer. He majored in literature as an undergraduate, and read and studied the works of the first wave of 20th century American Modernists (including, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, and Williams) as they appeared. He was friends with some of the poets of the second wave, Robert Lowell in particular.

More directly, many of Carter’s major works from across his entire career have literary backgrounds. Carter’s note frequently point to literary works and images that either guided his work or came to him after a composition was completed, and the allusion could performers and listeners find their way into a piece. Carter’s early career is filled with choral works and pieces for voice and piano. It’s a little surprising then that nearly thirty years elapsed between vocal works, after the appearance of Emblems (chorus) in 1947.

A Mirror on Which to Dwell was commissioned by Speculum Musicae (“mirror of music”) for soprano Susan Davenny Wyner. Since the commission was for a woman’s voice, Carter wanted to set the words of a female poet. Lowell pointed Carter to the work of Elizabeth Bishop, a rough contemporary of Lowell’s whose poetry turned out to appeal to the composer very much.

Bishop’s language is precise and abstract, much like Carter’s music. By “abstract” I don’t mean that her words and images are untethered to experience. Quite the opposite, in fact—her images are very much grounded in the world as we observe it. Her images reflect the way an observant mind works; she puts together things and ideas that would seem not to go together. After she has shown us that they do, we wonder how it was we never connected them ourselves.

One of Bishop’s lifelong concerns was with the borders that separate us, one from another, and from fully experiencing the world. This seems to me to parallel Carter’s interest in simultaneous streams of music—streams that occur at the same time, but something keeps them apart.

The six poems Carter sets in Mirror are not connected; this is not a song cycle as such but a collection of lyric pieces. Carter has arranged them so their focus narrows from general at the start to more specific at the end. The collection nature of the piece is emphasized by the instrumentation, which is different for each song. The vocal line tends to be angular, but the words come through clearly, as the rhythms are very much like those of spoken American English.

Carter’s settings are really more like expressively annotated readings than they are song or recitative. The musical materials are directly related to the poetic content of the poem, from the skittering oboe music in “Sandpiper” to the musical entropy that mirrors the diminishing energy that characterizes “Anaphora”.

Music in performance is an intensely collaborative artistic endeavor. Composing is much less collaborative, though working with a given performer or an ensemble when writing for them is certainly a collaborative effort. Setting pre-existing texts written by someone whom you may never have met, who in fact may have lived long before you read their work, is a special kind of collaboration. When there is artistic sympathy, a deep understanding of the words and what can be done with them, borders are crossed; connections are made.

Given two of Carter’s nearly career-long interests—in structural heterophony and in writing music that plays to the strengths and musical personalities of the performers—it isn’t surprising that solo (or duo) concertos make up a significant portion of his catalog. In the Piano Concerto (1965), for example, the soloist can be heard as representing expressive individuality, as opposed to the orchestral mass, whose massed forces surround her. In the Piano Concerto Carter gives the soloist a seven instrument supporting concertino, which plays the same kind of music as the soloist, against the more monolithic music of the orchestra.

In the Clarinet Concerto, Carter reimagined the relationship between the soloist and orchestra, resulting in a soundworld and formal layout that came to be characteristic of his recent music. The Concerto was composed for Pierre Boulez’ Ensemble intercontemporain (and its clarinetist Alain Damiens), and the Ensemble’s unusual instrumentation—13 winds and percussion and 5 strings—created a balance problem that Carter saw as an opportunity.

The structure Carter devised for the Concerto is a collage; it consists of seven short sections, each scored for a small subsection of the orchestra. Each, that is, except the last, which is the only tutti section in the piece. More important, the tutti section is the only part of the Concerto that has the orchestra playing in opposition to the clarinet. In the first six sections, which are short, self-contained musical character-statements, the clarinet is accompanied by small concertinos, as in the Piano Concerto, which offer support rather than opposition. The only orchestral tuttis occur in short links between the movements, while the soloist moves from one concertino to another—this movement from small group to small group is a visual cue that the clarinetist is a partner with the groups that play each section.

The backbone of this Concerto is the clarinet melody, which spins out over the course of the entire work, changing mood and character as the soloist joins a new concertino group. The melody is not built from scales or from collections of notes (a practice Carter uses frequently, but not here). The melody is instead built from a small collection of intervals Carter assigns to the clarinet—the other intervals are assigned to the orchestra, but the general practice in the orchestra is to build chords from the intervals. The clarinet melody is extremely free, therefore, and gives the impression of improvisation, especially in the sections that have a slightly jazzy feel.

This freedom of expression characterizes most of the solo parts in Carter’s concertos, regardless of whether the orchestral forces are with helpers or hinderers. In the Clarinet Concerto, the soloist even has the last utterance, a loud final note. Not the still, small voice, to be sure, but the last word nonetheless.

7.12.08

Carter spent the 1960s and 70s developing his musical language (mostly) outside of mainstream musical institutions and without resorting to trends like serialism, minimalism, and neo-Romanticism. Since that time he has written a series of pieces that have seemed to flow almost without effort and with what many observers hear as a new lucidity and transparency of texture and of musical discourse.

One vehicle for this transparency has been the composer’s frequent use of a kind of alternating form reminiscent of the baroque concerto grosso form. In a concerto grosso, sections of recurring material are played by the full orchestra (tutti). These tutti sections tend to be fuller and weightier than the sections that link them.

Seven watery, ephemeral tutti sections alternate with six brief (the longest is just under two minutes and the whole piece lasts but seventeen) “movements” scored for sub-divisions of the orchestra. For example, a movement marked “Lento, sostenuto” (Slow, sustained) is scored for the brass section after that section had been silent for the preceding tutti. With its constantly changing scoring, the color of Boston Concerto is kaleidoscopic in nature. The piece, like so much of Carter’s recent music, offers references to musical procedures of the past, colorful, virtuosic, and transparent instrumental writing, and collage-like forms in which musical characters appear and disappear before becoming fully developed.

After the final movement, “Maestoso – molto espressivo” (Majestic – very expressive), angular, craggy (in the finest New England tradition) lines for violins and cellos, comes the concluding tutti. Instead of a climactic peroration of the material of the concerto, this ending is quiet, slightly lingering, like a soft rain.

5.12.08

The symphony is typically a four-movement orchestral work that stands as a musical whole. The ways it can be made whole are tremendously varied—there can be a key scheme that holds it together, there can be thematic relationships between the movements, etc. The vast majority of symphonies have a first movement that makes a rigorous musical argument in what is called “sonata-allegro” form, a form whose properties are not at all relevant here. They also have last movements usually end in triumph (cf. Beethoven’s Fifth) or in resignation (Mahler 9); in either case, things get wrapped up.

Carter’s Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei is more of a triptych than a symphony, though it has the heft and size of a symphony. The composer takes his inspiration (and his subtitles) from Bulla ("The Bubble"), a poem (in Latin) by the 17-century British metaphysical poet Richard Crenshaw in which a bubble “represents” change and all that change means for life and art. The subtitle (“Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei”) means “I am the prize of flowing hope”.

The piece is suffused with irony, Carter’s favorite artistic mode—after all this is a 47-minute symphonic work about a bubble. The first movement (though “panel” seems more appropriate) is Partita (“I am the star of the sea, as it were, the golden wit of nature, the rambling tale of nature, the brief dream of nature”), which is not a reference to the baroque suite form, but rather the word is taken as it is in Italian, to mean “game”, as in a soccer match. There is no “form” as such, and the music does take on the aspect of something happening on the fly, as in a game. Partita is fast, rambunctious, and urban—the fast pace of much of Carter’s music is as direct an expression of modern life as there is in art. It is colorfully and clearly orchestrated, with virtuoso episodes for virtually every section in the orchestra. It embodies experience as explosively alive and vibrant.

The second panel, Adagio tenebroso (“I am the glass of the blind goddess”) is in stark contrast with Partita. Where the former is full of life, its changes and surprises, Adagio tenebroso seems haunted. It is a slow, irregular but inexorable march—Carter employs his structural polyrhythms closer to the surface here, sounding like an approaching army unsure of its course. The music builds and recedes in waves, promising resolution but withholding it. Withholding it, that is, until a big noisy passage right before the end, after which, the music dies away, with brief snippets of what had come before.

The first two panels of Symphonia deal, respectively, with light/life and dark/death. How does Carter resolve these two irreconcilable world views and give his work its proper symphonic conclusion?

The answer was the third panel, Allegro scorevole (“I am the brief nature of the wind. To be sure, I am the flower of the air.”). As the title (“fast, scurrying”) and subtitle implies, Allegro scorevole flies up and down through musical space with incredible speed, interrupted from time to time by episodes of sustained lyricism. The predominant mood of the piece is that of thoughtful lightness, with music that flows and tends to be soft rather than loud.

The trajectory of the scurrying music is upwards, while the contrasting lyrical passages are rather more earthbound. After a climax of the lyrical material, a coda briefly combines the lyrical and the scurrying until a lone piccolo in its highest register quietly ends the piece.

So maybe Carter does resolve the tension of the first two panels, in his own ironic way. An answer to the 20th century’s increasing urbanization and its attendant alienation, as well as the century’s seeming love of death, may be an ancient one: the still, small voice.

4.12.08

“Above all, I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy” –Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Carter used the phrase “thoughtful lightness” as part of his title for Con Leggerezza Pensosa (clarinet, violin, cello; 1990) but the philosophical and aesthetic point-of-view Calvino’s statement articulates could apply to most of the music Carter has written since the late 1980s. Many of these pieces are relatively short and have a textural transparency that was new to the composer’s music, except in special circumstances.

Carter’s career has been marked by periods of intense exploration, where new techniques and resources were discovered and studied, followed by periods where the advances in resources are explored and developed. The former periods are characterized big pieces that took the composer a long time to write. The latter periods include shorter, occasional works along with the big pieces.

Carter’s late late period is definitely one of the latter types. Since the late 1980s new compositions have appeared quickly—in fact, the pace of new works from Carter’s desk seems to be accelerating even now. One reason for this increased output since around the time he turned 80 is that the composer’s explorations have given him a set of resources (a limited number of chord types, for example) and techniques (structural polyrhythms and twelve-note all-interval chords, among others) that have proven to be versatile and flexible.

One of the first products of Carter’s late late period is Enchanted Preludes. It is scored for flute and cello and is in one short (about six minutes) movement. The music plays out as a series of high-spirited scherzo-like episodes. It is tempting to hear the cello in a secondary role, but I don’t think that’s the case. Most of the music lies in the cello’s upper register, to be sure, and it is more difficult to make the instrument speak as forcefully there than in its lower register, but the part is as nimble as the flute’s and as expressive.

Enchanted Preludes is built around a twelve-note all-interval chord (as opposed to the 88 such chords used in Night Fantasies), and the intervals are partitioned between the two instruments. For example, the flute is assigned the perfect fourth, while the cello plays perfect fifths, which are inversions (upside down) of perfect fourths. The instruments share the tritone, which is half an octave (six half-steps), and can’t be inverted.

The overall pace of the piece is set by a 45 (flute);56 (cello) structural polyrhythm, and the flute plays primarily in triplets and the cello in 4s. Most of the piece is, not surprisingly, fast, and it is very light on its feet. That is probably one reason the cello plays in its upper register most of the time.

The sprightly sound world of Enchanted Preludes is heightened by the frequent use of slightly extended performance techniques like flutter-tonguing in the flute and harmonics in the cello. These effects, along with the short phrases made of skittering notes or the little bursts of repeated notes that occur throughout Enchanted Preludes, give the piece that quality of “thoughtful lightness” that Cavino mentions. In fact, there are no emphasized downbeats in the entire piece—it never even touches the ground.

3.12.08

By the time Carter wrote Night Fantasies in 1980, the structural heterophony of the Sonata and Duo was an integral part of his musical personality. Night Fantasies was commissioned for four prominent pianists—Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens, and Charles Rosen—each of whom experience with the composer’s mature style, having played the solo part in either the Double Concerto (harpsichord and piano) or the Piano Concerto, so they were well-versed in Carter’s style.

Writing for four distinctive artists, each of whom would play the piece in terms of their own personalities, seems to have given Carter to express the multiple musical characters of his earlier works through one instrument. The metaphor through which Carter realizes this internal heterophony is that of “fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night”.

The musical “thoughts and feelings” of Night Fantasies are indeed fleeting. The ca. 20 minute, one movement piece is composed of dozens of contrasting, highly-characterized episodes. These character-episodes appear like unbidden thoughts, only to vanish and reappear later, altered and juxtaposed with different episodes. The expressive arc of the piece moves rapidly between moods and contrasting shades of light and dark.

Night Fantasies is a treasure trove of techniques that came to occupy Carter during his late period and his current late late period. The harmonic world of Night Fantasies is built on a collection of 88 twelve-note all-interval chords. These chords are made of one of each of the twelve pitch-classes (All C#s are members of the pitch-class C#, for example; therefore, an twelve-note, all-interval chord would contain one-and-only-one C#) deployed in musical space so that there is one occurrence of each interval (there are eleven intervals between a unison and an octave, ranging from the minor second [one half-step] and the major seventh [eleven half-steps]). These chords span five-and-a-half octaves, which is less than two octaves shy of the range of the piano, accounting for one of the sonic characteristics of Night Fantasies—the music moves over the range of the piano at a dazzling rate. It glitters in the piano’s upper register while the shadows loom in the lower.

While the use of twelve-note all-interval chords facilitate the rhapsodic placement of character-episodes in different registers when they reappear later in the piece, Carter’s use of a large-scale structural polyrhythm provides a temporal grid (note that the “grid” is one of the most potent metaphors in Modernism) on which to project the fantasies of the music. A cross-rhythm of 216 beats against 175 beats plays out over the 20 minute span of Night Fantasies—every beat sounds, but almost none of them are emphasized. Since the beats move at slightly different speeds, the temporal relationships between them are constantly changing, so the relationships between the various character-episodes are always changing.

None of this is meant to be “heard” on the surface of the music, like themes and motives would be. Rather, the chords and the cross-rhythms provide an underlying structure for the 20 minutes of flights of fancy and nocturnal rumination. It is often in this tension between technique and inspiration that one finds the frisson of artistic discovery.

2.12.08

Many readers of this blog know how important Elliott Carter’s music has been to me, and as we approach the composer’s 100th next week, I began thinking about which of his pieces have meant the most to me, and why. Naturally, that thinking has led to a list. So, beginning today and running through the 11th, the composer’s birthday, I’ll post an annotated list of the ten Carter pieces that have meant the most to me over the years. Some of them because of what I’ve learned from them, others because I heard them at the right time, and all of them because I just like them as music.

10. (Tie): Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974).

OK, so there are going to be 11 pieces in this top 10.

An important element of Carter’s music throughout his career has been the raising of heterophony (a textural term dealing with the presence of two or more more-or-less equal musical voices or lines) to a structural/dramatic value. In many of Carter’s works two or more streams of intensely contrasting music proceed simultaneously. The drama is in how they relate to each other as their foreground/background relationship shifts over the course of a piece.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano is Carter’s first thoroughgoing essay in structural heterophony, as well as an accessible and challenging piece for performers and audience alike. Carter was still writing music based on tonality at the time of the Sonata (it was completed on his 40th birthday in 1948), so the characterization of the cello and piano is based largely on rhythmic behavior patterns and the expressive style of the two instruments.

The beginning of the first movement is a direct statement of the idea of structural heterophony as well as the first example in Carter’s music of what would become an obsession with him. In this opening statement the piano moves in regular beats (what the composer would come to call “chronometric” time) and the cello plays irregularly expressive phrases with no specific link to any meter (“chronoametric” time). This passage echoes through the rest of Carter’s career.

The Duo for Violin and Piano dates from 1974, 24 years after the Sonata, and well after Carter’s massive stylistic change that was, I believe, triggered by the Sonata. The contrast between the violin and piano parts—Carter’s music was, by that time, pantonal, and the musical materials are partitioned between the two instruments by two-, three-, four-, and five-note sets as well as by the chronmetric and achronometric rhythmic personalities of the Sonata—is so integral to the musical content of the piece that Carter’s performance note suggests that the players be as far apart on the stage as possible.

In addition, much of the expressive drama of the Duo is created from the simple acoustic reality that the piano, as an instrument, is characterized by the fact that the performer has little control over a note once the key is struck while a violinist exerts a great deal of control over a note—including the ability to make it grow louder, which the piano cannot do, except by rapid repetition. The Duo, then, is a superposition of two distinct and expressive personalities, much like a marriage. (The piece is dedicated to Helen Carter, the composer’s wife, who died in 2003.) As in the Sonata, the Duo stakes out its poetic territory from the beginning, with the impassive tolling of rich, dissonant chords on the piano juxtaposed against mercurial phrases from the violin. Carter has compared this opening to “a man trying to climb a glacier”.

The Duo is one of the most “difficult” pieces from a composer known for his difficulty. It’s just this difficulty that has, in recent years, drawn more and more performers to Carter’s music—they see it as an artistic and technical challenge; a challenge worth accepting. When heard through the notion of two contrasting personalities trying to make a go of it together, the difficulty becomes part of the pleasure and the poetry.